This invention relates to automated managing of physical assets.
Managing customer premise equipment is a major challenge for many industries, particularly for those firms who have multiple service locations. Most customer premise equipment service providers, for instance, lack the information necessary to accurately quantify the costs associated with lost and stolen inventory, multiple shipments of parts, excessive inventory of field spares, repeat visits to customer sites caused by ineffective use of field stock inventory, billing errors, tracking of upgrades and warranty issues and lost future sales due to customer dissatisfaction caused by failing to meet existing service obligations.
One approach to managing customer premises equipment is a so-called open-loop control system. An open-loop system is a control mechanism that does not provide a feedback loop to its users during the process. A water treatment system that tests water as it flows through a meter, but does not use the information gained to adjust the process, is one example of an open-loop system.
Another example of an open-loop system is a private-package shipper that tracks a shipment of parts from a manufacturer to a depot through delivery to a customer's site. However, the open-loop nature of this system does not allow for feedback during the process, e.g., the customer cannot change his mind about the destination of a package once the shipper receives the package. Moreover, once delivered, the tracking system shuts down and collects no further information on that shipment. Thus, this open-loop tracking system is temporal in nature and cannot tell what happens to a specific package after delivery. All a customer knows is that a quantity of parts were delivered to a known address by a certain date.